Cochabamba Journal; A Nice Place to Live (Just Ask the Drug Barons)

By JOSEPH B. TREASTER, Special to The New York Times

Published: May 23, 1989

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia, May 16—
For most Bolivians, this is the ideal city. It is not as high in the Andes as La Paz, the capital, and therefore not as chilly. It is also not as low and steamy as Santa Cruz, the thriving second city in the subtropical plains.

''Almost every day here feels like spring,'' said Gaston Pol, the dean of the small graduate school at the University of San Simon.

Cochabamba, with about 300,000 residents, may also be the most prosperous city in Bolivia these days.

Its shoe and leather factories are in trouble and the canning plants are not doing so well. But the palm- and pine-shaded streets are clogged with new cars, and dozens of tall buildings are sprouting amid the old office and apartment blocks that vaguely recall Bolivia's Spanish heritage. A chrome and marble discotheque and perhaps the country's most stylish hotel opened a few months ago, and there are lots of excellent restaurants. The Wealth Is Awesome

The reason for the city's success, many residents say, is cocaine.

Cochabamba is on the western edge of the Chapare, the main coca-growing region in an otherwise impoverished country that is the world's second largest producer of cocaine. Farmers and chemicals for processing cocaine stream out of Cochabamba into the Chapare jungle. Awesome wealth flows back. ''The cocaine is without doubt the thing that yields the most money to this area,'' said Alfonso Canelas, a co-director with his father of Los Tiempos, Cochabamba's leading daily newspaper.

Some of the major figures in the cocaine world have built mansions here and peasants have begun buying color television sets. The average Bolivian earns $500 annually.

Some legitimate businessmen and some of the old families of Cochabamba say they resent the cocaine money. But the cocaine barons have nonetheless gained entry to the city's elite social clubs. An Eagerly Sought Invitation

People still talk about the gala wedding a few years ago of a daughter of Roberto Suarez, a powerful drug dealer who was the subject of a cameo appearance in the violent film ''Scarface'' and who is now in jail. ''Almost everybody who counts was there,'' said a woman at the center of Cochabamba society. ''People who didn't get invited were really mad.''

Cochabamba has not always been so accommodating. Simon J. Patino, a poor miner who stumbled across an ore deposit that started Bolivia's tin industry and made him one of the wealthiest men in the world, tried in vain to be accepted in the prestigous Social Club many years ago.

Mr. Patino angered a lot of local people by setting up offices in Europe and taking most of his profits out of Bolivia. But the Patino family took the edge off the animosity by setting up one of Bolivia's greatest philanthropic foundations. The Patino mansion is now a cultural center. The Patino foundation also runs a pediatric hospital in Cochabamba and an agricultural research center.

Klaus Barbie, who was the Gestapo chief in Lyons, lived quietly in Cochabamba until shortly before he was deported in 1983 to France, where he was tried and sentenced to life in prison. Gen. Luis Garcia Meza, who led the nation briefly in the early 1980's and was accused of involving the Government in narcotics trafficking, also lived here. Addiction on the Rise

The general paved a road leading to the Shrine of the Virgin of Urkupina, to whom the wealthy, including some of the narcotics trafficers, often make huge contributions. But even that did not endear him to most residents. No one has a good word for Mr. Barbie, who at one point worked as a security adviser to General Garcia Meza's Government.

Except for a spate of kidnappings of wealthy citizens last year, Cochabamba has had little violent crime. But cocaine addiction is rising and the city has Bolivia's largest population of street urchins.

The Rev. Patrick Henry, a Maryknoll priest from Omaha who provides shelter and vocational training to homeless boys, said the youngsters come to Cochabamba partly because of its mild climate and partly because it offers the prospect of work in the narcotics trade. Many work as stompers, Father Henry said, treading barefoot all night long over coca leaves in skin-searing solutions of diesel fuel, kerosene and sulfuric acid, in the first phase of cocaine production.

Everyone seems to have something nice to say about Humberto Coronel Rivas, a 63-year-old chicken farmer who is Mayor of Cochabamba. He has put in streets and sewers and lights where there were once only empty fields. A lot of the money, residents say, has been coming from taxes on real estate and cars bought with drug money. The Mayor says he knows nothing about cocaine.

''I am interested in resources coming in, not where they come from,'' he said. ''If it is cocaine, it is a question for the police. I don't ask a person who pays taxes to City Hall where the money comes from.''

Photo of street urchins watching television at a black-market store in Cochabamba, Bolivia, that caters to farmers in the cocaine-producing - and wealthy - Chapare jungle. (NYT/Peter McFarren); map of Bolivia showing location of Cochabamba (NYT)